It was only meant to be a prototype. But 40 years after the computer mouse first scrolled its way into the public consciousness, new touch-screen technology could be about to consign the mouse to the annals of history.

The computer mouse was the creation of Doug Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute in California, who needed a simple way of controlling their computers. The result was a carved wooden block mounted on wheels, with a long cable trailing out the back. One researcher nicknamed it a mouse, and the moniker stuck.

I don't think so. I think the mouse has years of life left in it yet. Personally I wish they would come up with something to replace the keyboard.

Just wait a few more years when we have implants that can read our brain patterns as text. The technology already exists for para- and quadra- plegic patients to control computers, TV's, wheelchair, prosthetics, etc. Now the technology just needs to be mainstreamed. Just think of the day when you can turn on the TV, open the curtains, operate your computer or your MP3 player all by thought alone....

Bad Bad Bad idea. Then you never need to get up. Watch Wallie for a PG end to that tale...

Oh I've seen that movie. Humans turn in to a bunch of fat, lazy, slobs. My mom and I both noticed this: For a childrens movie full of cutesy robot love Pixar certainly has added quite the hidden story of future humans being fat and lazy by our own technology. For such a light-hearted tale it has a deeper secret meaning.

Here's an interesting site on the history of the mouse, with interesting old pictures -

THE aim of this site is to provide a resource for expanding our current understanding of the development of the pathbreaking ideas connected with the mouse, hypertext, windowing, and networked collaborative workspaces, the individuals who worked with Engelbart in bringing them to light, the computer systems that came to embody them, and the dissemination of these ideas and devices beyond the original group at SRI to the world. The site contains a portion of the archival materials in the Douglas C. Engelbart Papers in Stanford University Library's Special Collections, drawn from the period of Engelbart's work at SRI from 1959 through the first public demonstration of the NLS (oNLine System) in 1968.